Family Portrait 2016: Part 2, Personal Computing

It is 2016! We each have personal computers! Actually, I should say, "devices", since we all have more than one and they aren't all computers in the sense that most people understand them. There are 4 of us, and we all have at least one notebook (aka Laptop) computer, and one tablet. I'll get back to the "at least" part a little later.

In today's world, it's the notebook computer that's the typical product and it's the desktop that's a specialty item. Now that our children are at or close to teenage years, we all have uses for an actual computer. The last holdout was the daughter who started on a notebook computer playing games both online and locally loaded. But then, she went completely iPad oriented when she received her first one a couple of years ago. Last month, she announced to me that she intended on putting a "computer" on her Christmas List. I told her to take it off because, in our family, those are "regular use" items and not something special. WOW, what a different technological world a few years have made! Her reason was that she wanted to have her own Minecraft account, so didn't want to share with her brother! Anyway, that get's us to our current situation. We all have a "main" machine that we work on. 

 

My son has gone through a series of various ThinkPads back to an IBM (!!!) ThinkPad A21p, many moons ago! Every couple of years, he's gotten an upgrade just as soon as somebody else upgraded from a machine that was too old and slow for their use. Of course, they've always been ThinkPads with the exception of my ill-fated foray into old gaming laptops first with a Clevo, that followed by an Alienware. Then, back I went, to the faithful ThinkPads, generally of 15" screen size because he mostly used them to play games on at home, till this the current school year when he started the 7th grade and needed to carry a machine back and forth. So, now he has a ThinPad X220 that's compact, thin, light and plenty powerful enough for doing PowerPoints, Google Docs and light research on the web..... oh, and the every-present "flash-games" that all middle school kids play! Minecraft has moved over to a "self-built" (me, not him) gaming box that got it's start from my brother sending an ASRock, Mini-ITX board populated with a second-gen Intel "Core" i5 processor. Eventually, it received my old third-gen i5 processor. Today, it does a nice job equipped with that, an Intel SSD, and an nVidia GTX 650 graphic card (so it can stream to nVidia Shield devices). More on that later as well. We have it hooked up to the new Sony 55" 4K TV in the game/media room. 

His "personal" device, is the nVidia Shield Tablet. It has a nice 8" IPS screen, a powerful K1 Quad-Core processor and capable of streaming games from his gaming machine since that has certain level nVidia graphic card in it! He loves it when he's not "on restriction" from not keeping grades up to snuff! If you haven't read my earlier post on this thing, I'll go over the high-points quickly here. Other than the typical Android type things, and the game streaming that it can do, it also has a dedicated gaming controller as well, plus the capability to connect to an outboard monitor via HDMI and function as a "console". It's really a pretty slick concept and nVidia's execution is very nice.

 

On to the daughter. She, like her brother started her computing life via ThinkPads. In her case, custom (by Daddy) painted lavender, X31. That was replaced by a ThinkPad Z60t.....right around the time she got an iPad. The rest (the laptop too).... as they say; was history. That is, right up until last November, when she decided she needed her own machine so she could have her own aforementioned Minecraft account.

Then, she (I) got lucky! I had a friend who had a Sony VCPEH, a decent 15.6" screen "desktop replacement" of the "Sandy Bridge" Core generation. It was brought to me with an apparently dead screen/video sub-system to retrieve files. Indeed, the screen refused to light up regardless of what I did. However, it did output to an external monitor indicating the GPU was still good. They had already bought a new machine and didn't want the computer back after I got their files off. So it sat under my desk for several months then in a box due to our move to the new house. When I started looking into my daughter's request, it occurred to me that maybe I could just replace the panel on this Sony. This required me to take it apart so I could see the model number. When it went back together, the screen came back to life! This was followed by me digging into my parts boxes for more RAM, and a drive. So now she has an i5, with 8Gb of RAM, and a 160Gb Intel SSD. Like a certain overgrown elf, Daddy wiggled his fingers and made a computer appear.

Then there's my wife. And since I just recently wrote about her machine, I'll just quickly recap here. Several years ago, I talked her into a second-hand iPad (1st gen) because I knew of one I could get cheap. That was like 10 of these things ago! For me, they've been like the episode of the classic Star Trek, "The Trouble with Tribbles". They just keep multiplying! There is of course, her progression through the generations of these things. That was followed by the expansion into "kid territory" when the children were both elementary school age because Mom had them using apps to suppliment their school learning. All of that was part of the greater issue; that of her starting to use them in the classroom with her students. This grew into a full-scale conversion from a set of old ThinkPads to "older" iPads, and now to iPad Minis. We're up to 5 Minis (not counting my daughters) and one iPad2. Oh, and my wife is now on a 1st gen iPad Air.

 

Comparatively, her notebook computer progression is rather simple. She uses, mid-sized (15") ThinkPads. I typically get her something in the "T" Series, although, she's had "A"s, as well as "Z"s. We are how literally in the middle of moving her from a T500 to a T530. I've had SSDs in her machines for some time now. The newest machine has a 480Gb, Intel 2500 with 8Gb of RAM. Otherwise, the machine is unremarkable, but completely adequate for her needs. She hates it every time I do it, but I upgrade her about every 2 to 3 years as you can probably tell by the model numbers of the latest round. She swears it's more often, because I tend to reload her OS every year in between.

As for me; I just wrote about that issue a couple of days ago, so won't repeat it here other than to say that I'm going to talk tablets soon.

Tablet Upgrade Time

My digital lifestyle has never really gotten tablet-centric. As much as I wanted to love them, I ended up being the lone holdout in our household. Yes, I would carry my ThinkPad "Slate", Android tablet around on occasion, but more times, than not, I wouldn't use it and even took to avoiding toting it altogether since it was so big and heavy. It turns out that getting the larger (10") class of tablet was a mistake for me. That made it too close to the "ultrabook" class of laptops that I was already using. 

 

At the time that I picked up the tablet, I was using the ThinkPad X300, and over the 3+ years since, I've gone on to the X301, followed by the X1. All of these machines are on, or close to the cutting edge in terms of "thin and light" for notebook computers...... which unfortunately, put the rather "heavy-weight" 10.1" ThinkPad Tablet too close in carry-load. And obviously, one of the very cool features of that tablet; that of the keyboard/folio, became a non-entity since it push the size and weight squarely into the notebook range! Don't get me wrong: the tablet was a very nice example of it's type and it's large IPS display made it and excellent reader and media display. ......But....... there was just not enough of a differentiation between it and my notebooks of choice!

Interestingly, it was the exact opposite usage model of my wife, who's notebook is a ThinkPad T500 with a 15" screen. This machine weighs between 5 and 6 pounds (maybe a little more since it has the extended 9-cell battery) making the difference between it and her iPad Air marked! For her, carrying around the laptop isn't an option, but the iPA really a none issue especially since she quite commonly lugs around a good sized bag with all manner of school teacher stuff in it. So it became pretty obvious to me that downsizing was going to a good answer for my tablet woes.

Now..... if I were a rich man..... (I'll save you the musical quote), I'd buy myself the Sony Xperia Z3 tablet and be done with it. It has a truly excellent (although, non-OLED) display and really nice metal construction giving it a nice thin profile and cutting the weight. It also has the ability to connect to and stream PS4 games from that console. Pretty cool if you own the console.

Think, somewhere between an iPad Air and Mini in size with similar feel. It's NICE!!! Somewhere between $450 and $500 worth of nice. Again, iPad Air comparisons are appropriate, but it runs Android. Yeah right..... now back to the real world of Frugal Propellerheads!

So, that's where this..... the nVidia Shield Tablet: he "poor man's" super-tablet comes into the picture. We can start with the list price being $300. That's not peanuts, but it's $200 less than the Sony for pretty much the same capabilities AND has a few tricks up it's sleeve. OK, I'll put you out of your misery and go ahead an tell you that I gave $185 for mine off of eBay. The seller stated that he was having trouble with WiFi connection, so I took the chance that he either had bad location on his access point location or didn't know what he was doing. I don't have any idea which is was, but I can say, I've had no issues with it at all. Is it the strongest at pulling in a signal? No, but neither is it terrible. I have to switch from one AP to the other when I move to opposite ends of my house, but I have to do with with most of my other devices as well. So yeah..... that's right...... $185!!! That's a pretty good deal in my book for arguably the #2 Android tablet on the market today after the Nexus 9! 

 

I did say "some tricks up it's sleeve" didn't I? A couple of posts ago, I talked about nVidia's Shield concept of being able to stream games. Over the course of the last 3 years, they've grown the concept and fleshed out the product line to include original Shield Portable running the Tegra 4, followed by the Shield Tablet the next year running the K1 processor and this year has seen the release of the Shield Console with the X1. All optimized for gaming with customized GPUs. So, not only do you have a device good at Android games, but the ability to play PC games from your gaming computer, but nVidia's Grid streaming service as well. That's a lot of capability. When you throw in Android emulation apps..... this device is literally "a game changer" (no pun intended)!

Most of you know that I'm not much of a gamer, but the fact is; I'm a sucker for interesting (cool) technology! And this family of products is definitely cool! Plus it's price-point makes it darn near irresistible! I do have another rationale in that I'm the sponsor of our school's computer club. Gaming and gamers are a big part of that. Shouldn't I be fully up to date on that part of the computing world!?!

Frugal Propellerhead Goes to Disney World

So; at long last; the Frugal Propellerhead meets the Disney Experience.... Oh, I don't mean the go to Disneyland for the day type of experience. That's more like a really, nicely done Six Flags. Nooooo..... I mean the full blown go to Disney World for a week immersion! It's no secret among my friends that I've never been a Disney kind of a guy. In fact, I'm famously anti-Disney. Just not a big believer in the sugar-coated perfect world structured for the upper-middle-class. Don't believe me? Go there and watch the people (and their behaviors), then compare that to the your last trip to the various Six Flags of the world. See..... But no, this is not a post on the sociological aspects of modern America and Disney's role in it, it's a post about our trip and how technology was part of it, as is the purpose of this Blog.

So how does anyone (much less a Propellerhead) deal with this? 

 

It starts with these two indispensible items. Your Magicband from Disney and your smartphone. Android, IOS doesn't matter. Getting the Disney experience App does. If you are planning on getting the full experience of several days and stay "on property" (more on this later), the Magicband is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah, that's what all it does. It completely eliminates the need to carry a wallet...... plus it tracks everything you do (as well as facilitate it) for Disney. So, it's not for the paranoid amongst you. But frankly, it's a bit of genius and works well. My personal favorite thing about it? It's your room key so you don't have to make sure to give the kids "the card" when they come and go! If you stay at one of the Disney properties, it really is like a magic key that does everything. And if you intend on doing the multiple day thing, I'd highly recommend staying "on property" and taking full advantage of all the Disney conveniences such as the transportation, food service (which was very good), and even little things such as having your purchases sent to your resort for pick up. Loved it! 

As far as the App goes, it allows you to manage your experience the whole time....in real time! Meaning you can see when your next appointment is that you have booked a "FastPass" time, where it's located, while helping you find it through the map function using GPS. My wife, who's the planner, kept her App (and us) going all the time! You can even manage your eating reservations on it as well (also, more on that later). The downside of course that all you who've used Smartphone apps that are GPS intensive is that it eats battery charge like nobody's business!

Which leads to this thing..... What is it? It's what they are calling, a "power station" these days, and this one is the EC Technologies 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh Ultra High Capacity "Power Station". It'd highly recommend it. Why?

If you can extrapolate by comparing it to either the iPad or the coffee cup; you can see that it's huge! Why this monstrocity!?! Well.... the 22400mAh requires no explanation. For a "power station" that number is huge (and apparently accurate) as well. We were able to use it virtually the entire week mostly recharging my wife's phone (and occasionally mine as well) without having to recharge it at all. The thing finally gave out the last 2 days of the trip. Oh yeah; it's CHEAP!!! $36.99 from Amazon. How is it so cheap? It has very few features on it at all, just the USB ports, charge indicator lights and a flashlight LED, plus it's not a well know company. I did do my research before buying it of course, and the reviews are excellent across the board. One reviewer even took it apart and found that it used top notch batteries and commented that it was cheap enough to even consider buying to take the individual cells out, but was too useful to do so! One caveate though; it's big and kinda heavy. So if you aren't carrying a decent sized pack (I was), then it will weigh you down with it's 15.36 oz weight!

 

If there were anything else that was indispensible, it was these 2 items. The top of course, was my ThinkPad X1 which happily greeted me at the beginning and end of each day. I used it for the normal stuff in the few minutes I had at thoses times and not much more needs to be said about it since I've written on it in past posts. The other item, I've touched on a little previously, but not in detail, so I'll talk more about it here. It's my Lenovo F-800 "Multi-Mode" Drive. Here's what it does: it's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external drive, WiFi access point (via the Ethernet port), WiFi streaming device (of media files stored in it's shared folder) either to computers logged on to it or Smartphones/Tablets running it's App.....oh yeah, it is also self-powered with it's internal battery as well as able to charge other devices as a charge station! We used almost all of those functions! On the roughly day and a half car trip, it served up movies to the children via their iPads in the back seat. No more cords! At Disney, I used it as a "dump station" for when I filled up the camera's memory cards (I carried 5). In some of the hotels, we used it as an Internet access point if the WiFi signal wasn't very strong. It's been so useful, it has replaced the HooToo Tripmate Nano which requires external power and found a permanent place in my technology bag! It's list price is $250, but I got mine on "special" directly from Lenovo for $100.

 

There was one other little thing..... we drove the hour or so East to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Let's just say that it was amazing and for someone like me (born in 1960) it fulfills one of my "bucket-list" items. The Atlantis exhibit was most impressive and brought back memories of the Challenger and Columbia which made me emotional.

Is there more to say? You bet, but that needs to be in another post where I'll discuss the various issues of photographing the Disney vacation!

iPads Are of the Devil!

There it is, the baaaad beasty! Just look at it! What harm could it be, I asked myself? Just one little iPad for my wife so she could test classroom kid apps on iOS against the Android. We were an Android house with 4 Android tablets running variously "Honeycomb to Ice Cream Sandwich". 

Then this happened. I got a great deal from a co-worker upgrading and asked my wife if she wanted it. "Sure", she said "What could it hurt"? Then she decided that iOS was more kid-centric on educational apps. And of course (as you know), iPad 1s can't be upgraded beyond iOS 5. 

You can predict what happened next right? This right here, of course! We bought a "2" (got a great deal by the way), and the original became Katie's, but mom wasn't terribly pleased because it wouldn't run the same apps. What to do?

This happened of course! Apparently, any idiot knows you don't let 2 iPads into your house....except me of obviously! So, we sell the offending iPad 1, and put the money into a partial payment for the.......

iPad Air for my wife, who then passes the iPad 2 down to Katie. Now you figure, we were finished right? Ohhhh, Nooooo! Now we had an issue of the one child using the iPad and the other who didn't have the same apps to work on. You try having an 8 year old girl share "her iPad" with her 11-year old brother!

That's when this happened! Within a short amount of time, we got Josh a Mini for his birthday, then later in the summer, decided that we were better off with both kids on Minis instead of Katie trying to tote around the much bigger "2", which became the wife's "school" iPad to use in the classroom as she moved to a Mac-centric district. 

In my mind's eye; it was this..... or this!!!

The effect was this! It was now the end of the summer and the school year was looming. I was tasked with the job of selling off the 9 old laptops that the wife had used in her classroom. I started selling old ThinkPads one after another and putting away the money. I won't regale you with the detaileds, but when the dust settled and it was "said and done" a week ago. We had as follows:

• 1 iPad Air 32Gb- Momma's personal property "NO TRESPASSING" by commoners
• 2 iPad 2s 16Gb/1 iPad Mini- Classroom iPads for working in "stations"
• 1 iPad 2 16Gb- Provided by her district for the teacher and used in her "stations"
• 1 iPad Mini Retina 16Gb- Katie's (she of the bad eyes) tablet
• 1 iPad Mini 16Gb- Josh's (he of the better eyes) tablet

That's 7 of these things if you count the school's and 6 if you don't! What am I using?

Well, duh! Did you expect Batman to start wearing green with gold bling? So, score one for the good guys! I did tell, my "Mac is great" brother-in-law" about the onslaught and he laughed, say "ahhh, iPads; the gateway drug of iOS". 

So you all should see this as a cautionary tale!

Spring Break 2014 with the Propellerhead Family

The "Family Truckster", well, actually....the family Civic Hybrid got to take a little trip this past week..... to the tune of 3 states in 3 days! We had already planned on making a little Texas triangle during out Spring Break, which was going to entail driving from DFW to Amarillo (about 7 hours) to see my wife's grandfather, then down to Carlsbad, New Mexico (about 5 hours down to Artesia where we planned to stay the night), through Carlsbad, New Mexico, on to Lubbock, Texas (about 4 hours) to see friends and attend a wedding, then home (about 7 more hours). As you can see, travel in this part of the country is calculated in hours instead of miles (or kilometers), so you can see how much of a day it's going to chew up. If you do this type of driving, even occasionally, you might want to consider a Hybrid. With the exception of driving through the "haboob" (33 mpg), I routinely got between 42 and 44 miles per gallon in the fully loaded car driving typically at 77 or 73 miles per hour (depending on the speed limit). That should fully explain why we drove that vehicle vs. our Chevy Trailblazer SUV!

However, the hand of God intervened and we received word of a death in the family which required our presence up in Cherokee country, in eastern Oklahoma (almost to the Arkansas border). So, instead of leaving on Tuesday, we left on Sunday. DFW to Stilwell, OK (about 6 hours) for the family needs, then, from there to Amarillo (about 8 hours), since it didn't make sense to go back to Dallas first. 

Yup, that's right; just west of Oklahoma City where the land flattens out significantly, the wind started to really pick up.......and all that, that implies out in this part of the country. In fact, we would find out later that, gusts were up to 60mph! So, inside of your head, imagine, driving a fairly lightweight car, with a constant crosswind (almost completely 90 degrees most of the time) of about 40mph, with those gusts, plus the road looking like this most of the way. Let's just say it wasn't much fun. 

The 5 plus hours, the following day, plus the 3 plus hours of the day after that mostly looked like this.....when we were lucky. You might want to ask why would I subject myself and the family to this.

You might have heard of Carlsbad Caverns, some of the most extensive naturally occurring cavern complexes in the world and a National Park. Over the last 40 years, I've probably been there at least 15 times, but for my kids, it was just the right age to go. Just one instance of seeing my 10 year-old son with his mouth open and no words coming out would have been enough, but it rendered him pretty-much speechless for several hours! If you haven't taken your young kids to Carlsbad, it's well worth the hours of desert driving. I do have a couple of recommendations, especially if your family is as nerdy as mine. Stop in Roswell and tool around the curio shops specializing in "the Incident" surround the alleged 1947 UFO incident and ensuing "cover-up". We then drove down the road and stayed at the particularly clean and efficient Legacy Inn, in Artesia. Very nice for a microtel style hotel. How does one keep himself/herself sane during all those hours of driving?

The most important daddy device known to man! Given that it's an Apple device, you long time readers know that it takes a lot for me to make that pronouncement! Our original 30Gb iPod video that I bought my wife years ago was literally bursting at the seams. So, when I upgraded her laptop to the T500, I also cleared off my 80Gb Classic and moved her account to it. Basically, our entire library of music is on this device and we can just grab it when we head out the door. The battery easily goes 7-8 hours on the more extended drives and so generally doesn't require charging.

For anyone who has traveled with a 10 year old, OR a 7 year old, much less a 10 AND a 7 year old, then you know that long hours in a car are challenging. We handle this with a twin attack. Our kids have been trained from a young age to read..... a lot, so they each carried 3 books, we also had their tablets along for the ride. One had her iPad2 and the other had the Android version ThinkPad tablet like the one I use. We also have a little 7" screen'd DVD player for some of the longer stretches (more than 3 hours). The wife was similarly equipped except that along with her Hi-Tech iPad Air, the decidedly Low-Tech crocheting needels and yarn as well. 

As for me, I rarely go anywhere for more than a day without my travel computer; the ThinkPad X301. Then of course, since we were going as a family to interesting places; that required the serious camera; the Nikon D300. 

Some of you might think it's excessive, but I also carried my ThinkPad Tablet, identical to the one my son uses, except mine has more storage capacity. This is my reading device, as well as quick "look-ups". It might sound crazy, but we used virtually all of these devices every place we went and most every day. The camera being the only one that didn't get consistent use, but when I did use it; I used it A LOT, such as in the Caverns. 

The technological surprise of this trip? My wife's new iPad Air has completely eliminated the secondary small "pocket camera" that people used to always carry. She didn't even take her Nikon S8100 along. I strongly suspect that it will continue to gather dust in the coming years. 

Coming from the "no surprise at all" category? It's of course, the increasing reliance on the integrated GPS system. Even when I didn't need it, it was reassuring to watch yourself making progress across the plains or deserts. Such is the state of the modern vacation. Same places. Different equipment.